Book 2, Chapter 69

As the sun sank lower and lower toward the horizon, I began to fear that I’d overestimated Monarch’s ability to scry. The wards from my original hideout, where her mirror and mine were encased in stone and looked like nothing more than another chunk of rubble on the pile, had degraded to the point where I no longer considered them trustworthy. They’d do little more than provide some interference at this point, but they hadn’t quite run out of power.

Monarch hadn’t activated her mirror, though, which might be because she just hadn’t gotten around to it yet, or it might be because even my degraded wards were protecting the device too well. If I had to go back there and tear down what was left of the wards manually, it would mess my whole plan up. Perhaps that was the issue. Maybe she’d done a quick scry and seen through my mirror-to-mirror communication ruse, and was hoping to bait me back to the site.

If so, she was in for a surprise. I had no intention of going back there and would in fact just skip the meeting to continue on with my work. Our first meeting could be face-to-face and, at that point, I’d have little reason not to follow through my plans on exterminating the entire cabal.

While I was considering my next move, my scrying mirror, the one I had built to communicate with my family, flickered to life. I was holding the link between it and the secondary mirror I’d made especially for this occasion open through sheer will, able to be dropped at any time if I sensed some sort of threat. I doubted Monarch had the skills to attack through a scrying mirror, but the Wolf Pack had surprised me often enough to keep me wary.

A woman appeared, her face smooth and ageless, the kind of appearance that came from centuries of life-extending invocations. Once upon a time, my own face had looked similar. Of course, that was where the similarities ended. Her hair was a pale silver, not quite gray, and extraordinarily straight and fine. Her irises were a vibrant gold, a wholly unnatural color.

I vaguely remembered a trend among the class of mage lords in some little no-name kingdom where they modified their bodies with magic so thoroughly as to produce offspring with similar characteristics. Eyes and hair like the woman in the mirror’s became common then, each mage lords’ lines producing different combinations and defending their look fiercely against other families seeking to copy it.

That had died out after five or six generations once the kingdom collapsed and the mage lords had lost their positions of power. Interbreeding with partners who hadn’t had their bodies magically modified had eventually restored normal eyes and hair to the bloodlines. By the time a few hundred years had gone by, it was unusual to see anything more than a fleck of color in just the right lighting, but in this case, it seemed that someone had revived the tradition in Monarch.

The line of tattoos starting below her eyes and going down to her chin were new, however. Each one was a chain of runes inked so finely that I couldn’t read them without sharpening my vision. There was a third eye tattooed on her forehead, much like the gold version Echo had worn in my surveillance scrying spell.

“They told me you were but a child,” the woman said, her voice surprisingly deep. “Still, I admit I did next expect you to be so… young.”

I said nothing as I read the runes running down her face. As far as I could tell, they were gibberish, pure ornamentation. All of them were drawn correctly, but the order they were placed in did nothing at all. It was like reading a string of random, disconnected words. That said, I suspected there was more to it than simple decoration. Much like my crucible, it was possible she might call specific runes from the tattoos and rearrange them.

That seemed like a roundabout and wasteful method of creating rune structures, not to mention looking incredibly tacky. I couldn’t imagine what such tattoos would accomplish that couldn’t have been done by carving the runes into a wand instead.

I couldn’t see much of her surroundings or background, but I did note a torque visible around her neck with a familiar pattern of runes—her very own shield ward. It was far more extensive than those belts Weaver had been pumping out, but it looked like he’d designed them using the torque as inspiration. I wondered how many of their standard pieces of gear were modeled off what little he’d been able to decipher of the antiques Monarch’s family had passed down to her.

“Nothing to say?” she asked.

“It wasn’t a question,” I said.

“No, I suppose it wasn’t.” She paused for a second and added, “Keiran. That is an interesting name, and from what I have been able to learn, not the one you were born with. Keiran. Hmm. Keiran… of the Night Vale?”

“You’ve heard of me? That’s surprising. No one else has recognized it.”

“I am very old,” Monarch said lightly. “Though, whether you are really that Keiran or just someone imitating him remains to be seen.”

“I don’t really feel like I need to prove myself to you,” I said. “My actions can speak for my competence.”

“Indeed. You’ve caused considerable damage to my organization in such a short amount of time, and my agents are no closer to catching you now than when you first appeared. But I suppose you are running out of easily accessible targets, thus your message suing for peace.”

“Believe me, it’s not that I can’t keep picking you apart,” I said. “I’m just starting to lose interest. I had expected your cabal to be more of a threat, but lately I feel like I’m just wasting my time.”

I left unsaid that my change of heart was largely that I’d removed everyone important to me from their reach. If they sent another group of mages to subjugate Alkerist again, or even to kill everyone there, it would make little difference to me. The village’s value at this point was almost exclusively in my family’s attachment to it, and there was only so far I was willing to go to continue to protect it.

Now, if Monarch had been a threat to me, that would be a different story. I didn’t tend to let things that could threaten me live long enough to become actual problems. So far, all of the Wolf Pack had neatly fit into the category of temporary nuisances and momentary threats that I’d outgrow soon enough. She didn’t strike me as being much farther ahead of her subordinates. And if she was, she was deliberately keeping them poorly trained and equipped, probably as a means of controlling them.

“My grandfather used to tell me stories about Keiran of the Night Vale,” Monarch said. “The most powerful archmage to have ever lived, according to his father, who had worked directly with Keiran’s foremost apprentice. The man from those stories would have wiped all of Derro off the map with a wave of his hand. As effective as you’ve been at harassing my cabal, you just don’t seem to have that level of power.”

“I’ll bet in those stories, I wasn’t trapped in the body of a child living in a desert with no ambient mana, either,” I told her. “We’re all working with a handicap now.”

“Interesting.” Her lips curled up into an evil grin. “So you admit your weakness.”

I rolled my eyes. “It won’t hurt my feelings if you want to underestimate me. Who was your great-grandfather’s friend, my supposed top apprentice?”

“Ammun Nescect.”

“That guy?” I laughed. “Ammun was a long way from being my foremost apprentice. He was gifted, but so was almost everyone I taught. And he had more ambition than sense. From what I understand, he’s the one responsible for screwing everything up after I left. I heard he broke into my old vaults and got his hands on something he didn’t understand.”

Her voice turned chill, and she snapped, “If I were looking for a reason to doubt your claims, slandering the honor of my great-grandfather would be a good one. Best take care how you speak if you value your life.”

“Oh, please,” I said. “Do you honestly think I’m afraid of some fashion reject done up in a style that went out thousands of years ago? The only threat your group represents is your box of trinkets preserved from long ago. Without those toys, not a one of you has anything approaching real power. It’s like being harassed by a group of aggressive second-year apprentices.”

I didn’t pay attention to what she said next. My scrying spell wasn’t limited to just the mirror, and I’d expanded it to watch the whole building and surrounding area. So I wasn’t terribly surprised to see a few dozen enforcers converging on it, including a few of the well-equipped ones from the inner city. Unless I missed my guess, some of the lesser cabal members were leading them.

“—a fool to show your face,” Monarch sneered at me. “Did you really think we’d let you just walk away unpunished? There’s no escaping now.”

On some signal I couldn’t see, they ripped out the sides of the hideout and swarmed in, only to find nothing there. The mages grouped up and started discussing something in a low voice, no doubt trying to determine if I was there and what kind of magic might be hiding me.

“You know, I really was willing to let the rest of you live, provided you agreed to a few things,” I said. “I’m not feeling quite so generous anymore.”

I activated the trap I’d left behind, and hundreds of stone spikes shot up in every direction. I’d invested a considerable amount of mana into that, enough to rival a master tier spell, enough that even though those mages leading the ambush were wearing shield ward belts, they faltered under the strain. Twenty people died in a few seconds, with only the slowest to rush in and those who’d remained outside to form a perimeter spared.

A column of fire roared up into the sky, incinerating anyone who’d managed to survive being skewered and turning the corpses into ash-colored skeletons. Those enforcers on the outside perimeter got scorched by the wave of heat rolling out even if they weren’t caught by the fire directly. Some of them managed to flee in time or had enough magical protections to keep them clinging to life, but about half of them succumbed to the flames.

I’d deliberately designed the attack to have two stages to overwhelm any sort of shield wards or other protections, with the inferno drawing its power from the mana still inside the circle, which was to say from those who’d fallen victim to the first attack. I hadn’t expected it to be quite that powerful, but those outer circle mages must have been carrying some mana storage on them in addition to what was in their own cores. All those enforcer batons with storage crystals had helped raise the temperature significantly as well.

The stones glowed with leftover heat, including the one our scrying mirrors were in. Monarch must have been monitoring the area with a separate scrying spell as well, because she had a shocked expression on her face. The image was starting to distort from the heat damage to the mirrors and would snap any second. It probably would have already if I wasn’t using my own magic to keep it stable.

“I did not expect you to engage in negotiations in good faith,” I told her. “It would have been easier for both of us if you had, but this is fine as well. We’ll play this game out to the end, Monarch. I’ll be seeing you again very soon.”

Then I released my hold on the scrying spell and let the heat shatter both mirrors, severing the connection.